Tagaytay Mapping Party

This Tagaytay Mapping Party is the first ever OpenStreetMap Mapping Party (well, technically a Micro Mapping Party) in the Philippines and possibly the first in Southeast Asia. The event occurred on a Saturday, May 16, 2009, at the picturesque City of Tagaytay (Wikipedia). The aim is to map as much of the city and by many respects, the Mapping Party was a success.

Background

Before the Tagaytay Mapping Party, members of the Philippine OpenStreetMap community had been content to do mapping on their own time and with some coordination through the talk-ph mailing list. There had been a few OSM-related events (mostly Maning explaining to various groups what OSM is) but nothing substantial came until the first real OpenStreetMap meet-up was held in Makati last February 7, 2009. The meet-up had several people in attendance and anecdotes were exchanged alongside geeking out over GPS equipment. The idea for a Mapping Party was also talked about in the meet-up.

Bolstered by this meet-up, Maning soon suggested on the mailing list that the community have its first ever Mapping Party. Eugene suggested Tagaytay as the venue for a lot of good reasons, and a date (March 14) was set. However, due to scheduling problems, not many people could come and so the plan was shelved.

In April 2009, the idea was revived by Ian and the event quickly materialized. The date (May 16) was set and most of the planning occurred on the mailing list with some documentation posted on the Wiki page.

Why Tagaytay?

Since many Filipino OpenStreetMappers live in and around Metro Manila, it's natural that the chosen location would be somewhere near the metropolis. Since Metro Manila is fairly well-mapped and is already served by Yahoo! Aerial Imagery, the mappers decided to go out of town. Tagaytay was chosen as the venue due to a number of very good reasons:

Tagaytay is a popular tourist area so having a map of the city would help promote tourism.

Since Tagaytay is a tourist area, the mapping party also doubled as a family outing for those mappers who decided to bring their family. (And many did so, dropping them off to have fun somewhere.)

The city is located on top of a wide ridge so it would provide excellent GPS coverage.

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft don't have high-resolution satellite imagery of this area so OpenStreetMap can one-up other online mapping providers.

The city has a cooler climate being in the highlands. This is perfect for outdoor mapping during the summer!

Event details

Objectives

Since Tagaytay was almost a blank slate before the Mapping Party, the main objective was to capture as many of the accessible roads as possible. If lucky, roads inside the gated communities (subdivisions) are also fair game. Since Tagaytay is also a tourist spot, the secondary objective was to pinpoint as many of the tourist spots as possible, in addition to the usual POIs. Lists of convents, retreat houses, parks, schools, hospitals, and hotels were compiled in order to be noted should the mappers run into them.

Participants

All of the people who confirmed their attendance at the mailing list managed to arrive in Tagaytay. (Yay!) Many even brought along their family to enjoy the cool air of the city.

Morning session and the cake slicing

The Starbucks branch in the popular restaurant complex in Tagaytay was the agreed meeting place and the mappers arrived there safely (but in typical Filipino-time fashion). Since this was the first time most of the mappers have met each other in real life there were plenty of introductions.

The Tagaytay cake wasn't sliced prior to the event because attendance wasn't sure, so a great deal of the morning of the Mapping Party was spent dividing Tagaytay and grouping the people into teams. The mappers then decided to divide Tagaytay according to the main roads going to the city. See the map below to see the final slices and assignments.

Map to follow

Slice

Mappers

Remarks

West of the Mendez Road

Ed (and his family)

This slice contains the area leading to Mendez and Nasugbu including the area around Sonya's Garden

Between Mendez Road and Alfonso Road including the City Hall eye area

Maning and Andre

This slice contains the City Hall, Taal Vista Hotel, Robinsons Land properties, and the public market

Between Aguinaldo Highway and Sta. Rosa Road

Rally, Neil, and Rem

This slice contains the SVD houses, Pink Sisters, other retreat houses, and AUP

Afternoon session

The mappers initially planned to go back to Starbucks at around 3:00pm but two of the teams (Maning's and Eugene's) decided to survey some more so the mappers ended up meeting at around 4:00pm. Rally's team wasn't informed of the change in plans so their team went ahead to the meeting place. Roger Chua of Web Philippines attended the afternoon session to observe.

Starbucks unfortunately didn't have wireless Internet so no live editing was done. Maning collected the GPX tracks to make the party render at home while Rally showed his gear including his ASUS Eee PC loaded with Garmin Mapsource. Maning also demonstrated some capabilities of JOSM especially its use in photo-mapping (by synchronizing the camera time to the GPS time). The mappers also exchanged stories during the mapping and everyone pretty much had a great time.